New state website details Colorado schools’ revenue, spending

The Gazette (Colorado Springs): Which local school district spends the most money per student? How about the least? Which district gets the most federal funding?

The answers can be found on a new website the Colorado Department of Education has launched.

The Colorado K-12 Financial Transparency website, https://colorado k12financialtransparency.com/#, provides revenue and expenditure statistics for each of the state’s 178 public school districts, most schools and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES.

Colorado lawmakers called for the site three years ago to foster greater financial transparency. In 2015, the Colorado Department of Education hired BrightBytes, a San Francisco education analytics company, to create the site.

Data presented is from fiscal year 2015-16, when the state educated 899,112 students in 1,857 public schools.

Of those, 227 were charter schools, which have more flexibility with governance, curriculum and finances and fall under less regulation than traditional public schools.